Not too long ago a priest told me that he cancelled his subscription to the New York Times because he felt that the endless stories about war, crime, power games and political manipulation only disturbed his mind and heart and prevented him from meditation and prayer.
That is a sad story because it suggests that only by denying the world can you live in it, that only by surrounding yourself by an artificial, self-induced quietude can you live a spiritual life. A real spiritual life does exactly the opposite: it makes us so alert and aware of the world around us, that all that is and happens becomes part of our contemplation and meditation and invites us to a free and fearless response.
It is this alertness in solitude that can change our life indeed. It makes all the difference in the world how we look at and relate to our own history through which the world speaks to us.
When I look back at the last twenty years, I see that I find myself in a place and situation I had not even dreamt of when I, together with 28 classmates, prostrated myself on the floor of a Dutch Cathedral on the day of my ordination. I had hardly heard about Martin Luther King and racial problems, nor did I know the names of John F. Kennedy and Dag Hammarskjold. I had seen the old fat Cardinal Roncalli on a pilgrimage to Padua and thought of him as an example of clerical decadency. I had read wild books about political intrigues in the Kremlin and felt happy that such things were impossible in the free world. I had heard more than I could bear about the Jewish concentration camps but realized that they belonged to a world of the older generation and were incompatible with my own. And now, only a few years later, my mind and heart are full of memories and facts that have molded me into a quite different person than I ever expected to be. Now, while able to see the end of my life cycle as well as its beginning, I realize that I have only one life to live and that it will be a life covering a period of history of which I not only am a part but which I also helped to shape. Now I see that I cannot just point to Dallas, Viet Nam, My Lai and Watergate as the explanation of why my life was different than I had foreseen, but have to search for the roots of these names in the center of my own solitude.
In our solitude, our history no longer can remain a random collection of disconnected incidents and accidents but has to become a constant call for the change of heart and mind. There we can break through the fatalistic chain of cause and effect and listen with our inner senses to the deeper meaning of the actualities of everyday life. There the world no longer is diabolic, dividing us into “fors” and “againsts” but becomes symbolic, asking us to unite and reunite the outer with the inner events. There the killing of a president, the success of a moonshot, the destruction of cities by cruel bombing and the disintegration of a government by the lust for power, as well as the many personal disappointments and pains, no longer can be seen as unavoidable concomitants of our life, but all become urgent invitations to a response; that is, a personal engagement.
~Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
